Ladies and Gentlemen (24 page)

“Have you been talking with my sister?” he asked me over the phone. “Have you been meeting her after school?”

To try to explain would have meant admitting to the thing boys scorn most mercilessly in their peers: ambition.

I said nothing.

“Rose, you’re such a kike piece of shit. Do me a favor and stay away from her. In fact, stay away from me too.”

He hung up.

It was the “kike” thing that sent me to my father.

The day following my fight with Kyle, my dad and I were recording an episode of
The Eternal Light
, a joy because I got to miss school, but a chore because it was a grind. We taped at NBC on 44th and Sixth on a gigantic soundstage designed to accommodate a whole orchestra and then some, with microphones shaped like ears of corn hanging on long wires from high ceilings that were curved and made of rich-looking wood, as if we’d been enclosed in a shell fashioned of mahogany. The far corners of the space were piled with old sound-effects stations, wooden contraptions like miniature lemonade stands to which clown horns, bicycle bells, triangles, and door knockers were attached. There were door frames that creaked intentionally, a police siren you wound with a crank, and an enormous Chinese gong that I was told by the director
to never,
ever
hit lest I blow the speakers in the control room to smithereens, and that I dream of bashing to this day. In the stage’s center, near the two main microphones, was an enormous table, and the cast would gather here to do a read-through of the script together, the director giving us notes and making last-minute edits. After our lunch break we did two back-to-back hour-long recordings of the program straight through, no cuts. For all intents and purposes it was a live performance, so you had to follow the script carefully as the program proceeded in order not to miss your entrance (you’d get up from the table as quietly as possible, cautious not to rustle the pages of your script while tiptoeing to the mike), a lapse that could ruin a whole taping. The mikes were so sensitive they’d pick up a whisper; and because editing capabilities were limited, you couldn’t make a mistake.

We were doing
The Chosen
, Chaim Potok’s novel about an Orthodox boy, Reuven Malter, and his brilliant Hasidic friend Danny Saunders. I understood maybe a quarter of it, but I liked it even then, especially the baseball game at the beginning. I had a bit part as Davey Cantor, one of Reuven’s teammates, and my lines were all a variation of “Wait till you see them, Reuven,” referring to the opposing Hasidic team, “they’re
murderers.
” But my dad was playing Reb Saunders, Danny’s father, and perhaps because I badly needed his advice, I followed the story with interest. From what I could make out at the time, it was about two Jewish kids whose dads had different rules about being Jewish. I liked that after Danny hits a ball into Reuven’s eye during the game, the two of them patch things up; it made me hopeful for Kyle and me. And I admired Danny’s brilliance because it reminded me of Abe, in
particular his ability to remember things in stories, and how when we read Shakespeare he could tell you page, act, scene, and line. Most of all, I enjoyed watching my father perform. At home he was often jumpy, distracted. It was hard to keep his attention. His mind wandered. He’d begin to talk and then trail off. If the phone rang (“That’s probably the agency”) he’d get up to take the call, even during dinner. But when he performed, he was a different person. He was focused. He listened to everything and didn’t miss a cue. He possessed an authority that without lines was entirely absent. And when his time came to act he would quietly step to the mike with his script in his right hand, his left free to gesture, and he’d begin to speak as if through a prompter, with that distinct, more knowing voice-within-a-voice. Suddenly he was the deep, wise sound of reason; he
was
Reb Saunders. It was the oddest thing, but that was his gift: he read aloud and you believed him, even if he couldn’t explain later what it was he’d uttered so eloquently.

But because there was so much of the play I
didn’t
understand, so many basics, I needed his help. What was the Talmud? Gematria? Zionism?
Smicha?
It was like Abe’s bar mitzvah, but without Abe. It was overwhelming, like reading through Swiss cheese. My father couldn’t explain a lot of it, which was fine. I could accept all the unfamiliar terminology, but what I found most confusing was how Reb Saunders refused to talk to Danny.

“He’s training him,” my father explained. “He’s training him to become a tzaddik.” We were taking a cab home, something my father splurged on only after a full day of work. It was well past six and the traffic was bad. When my father said
tzaddik
, he stressed
the first syllable, making a sound like
ts
and then pronouncing the
z
.

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a religious leader. That’s what Reb Saunders is. He’s a powerful rabbi.”

“Oh,” I said. “So he’s a
Reb.
”

“Exactly.”

“What about Nu?”

“
Nu
. It’s Yiddish. Let’s see.
Nu
is like … it’s like the word ‘well.’ You’d say, ‘Well, when do we eat?’ Some Jews say, ‘Nu, when do we eat?’ ”

“So why not talk to him?”

“Reb Saunders? To Danny?”

“Yes.”

“Because he wants his son to suffer. He expects his son to take his place one day as tzaddik, and only someone who has suffered can feel the pain of the people he leads.”

I thought about this for a while. “You made a good Reb,” I told him.

My father turned to me, smiling appreciatively. “Thank you.”

“I’m glad you and I talk.”

“I am too.”

“Nu,”
I said, “what about
kike
?”

My father did a double take. “That wasn’t in the show.”

I told him Kyle had called me one, but it wasn’t a big deal. When they got into fights, he called Abe that too.

My father considered this silently, then asked the driver to take us once around the park.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a nasty word for Jew.”

“Have you ever been called one?”

“Yes. In the navy.” The memory seemed to shake him. My father had been a naval photographer on a destroyer during Korea, though from what he’d told me it seemed his convoy spent all of its time in Greece. “A lot of the Southern guys said it. Though most of the time they called me Burger.”

“Why?”

“Because of my name.”

I waited.

“Rosenberg,” he said. “Rosen
burger
.”

“Check.”

My mother was from the South. We spent every Christmas in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family. My grandfather was a colonel, and at night he and my father drank Wild Turkey, which my grandfather poured out first into a measuring cup (“He’s a diabetic,” my mother tried to explain). Last year, after a dinner filled with talk about the upcoming presidential election, my father and I had gone on an errand to the supermarket for my grandmother, and he said to me, “Just so you know, I hate it down here. I hate
all
of these people.” Now I understood why.

“When they called you kike, what did you do?”

My father smiled. “I took their picture.”

“Why?”

“It calmed them down. It made them nice. I’d say, ‘Bubba, let me take your picture. I’ll send a copy to your mom. Or your girl.’ ”

“What did they call you after that?”

“After that they called me Nate.”

“Where does it come from?”

“Nate?”

“Kike.”

“That’s an interesting question. I asked my father that once.” My grandfather, Zada, a man I’d never met, was already long dead. Babu, my grandmother, lived alone in Los Angeles. She and Zada had moved there when my father was fifteen, leaving him behind in New York with his uncle so he could attend Music & Art high school. I knew next to nothing of her either—I’d met her once—except that she was from someplace in Russia or Poland that I couldn’t find on a map and had fled to America because of pogroms, which for years I thought were a race of people. For my birthday, she unfailingly sent me a $25 check in a Hallmark card. “He told me that it comes from the Yiddish word
kikel
. That means ‘circle.’ Jews, when they came to America, they signed their immigration papers with a circle instead of an X.”

“Why?”

“Because
X
is the sign of Christ.”

My father sounded like Reb Saunders explaining this. I was impressed by how much he knew.

“Anyway,” he continued, “the men on Ellis Island who registered them began calling them
kikels
, which then became
kike
, I guess.”

“What did your dad do?”

“He was a furrier. He made furs. For coats.”

“Did he make money doing it?”

“No, he was always broke.”

Our cab drove up the long hill at the northernmost end of the park.

“What is a Jew?” I asked him.

He waited for a long time. “What do you think it is?”

I thought for a while. I couldn’t say why, exactly, but when I imagined a Jew, I always pictured Abe’s father. There was a photo of him in Abe’s bedroom that I loved. He was in his infantry uniform, leaning against a lightpole smoking a cigarette. He had the coolest black moustache. Though his family had fled Germany before the war, many of their relatives had been killed. He was sixteen when he arrived in America and immediately enlisted in the army, lying about his age, “so he could kill Nazis,” according to Abe. He had a scar over his right eye from when a Nazi sergeant kicked him in the face one day on the street when he was ten years old. Mr. Herman later captured this same Nazi behind enemy lines, tied him up, and “beat the living shit out of him,” also according to Abe. But many years later, Mr. Herman himself told me he’d put two bullets in the man’s head: “two eyes for an eye.” He had a ton of these stories, though in truth I thought of Mr. Herman as a Jew mostly because I couldn’t go to Abe’s house on Fridays or during Passover, when his family withdrew and their apartment became a kind of impregnable fortress. I did get invited that December for the lighting of their menorah, when again Abe sang in Hebrew (which I thought must be the same as Yiddish). He put on his yarmulke and chanted at the candelabra, and perhaps because we all stood so close around him he seemed oddly self-conscious, less sure of himself than during his bar mitzvah, and he occasionally fumbled the words, a rarity for Abe. “If we blow into the narrow end of the
shofar,” declares a writer I love, “we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all.” I read this in college and felt angry with my father for leaving my Jewishness to me; I remember thinking I was doomed to live a life without spiritual direction or shape—but I no longer accept that, at least not completely. It is to the memories of Abe’s chanting, of Kyle’s apartment, of Elsa’s tiny mouth, of my father’s voice (“He,” referring to Elvis and the tenth anniversary collector’s set, “was the King!”)—it is to
these
that I am bound back.

“A Jew is someone who knows things,” I said.

“Like?”

“Like what to sing.” Then I thought of Mr. Herman enlisting. “Like what to do.”

“You know,” my father said, “I was a cantor when I was your age. A singer in synagogue.”

“You know all those words?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why did you stop?”

“Why did I stop?” my father repeated. “I stopped because everywhere we went, my father was always making me sing.”

My father didn’t sing much anymore, though one of my earliest memories was of watching him perform on television. It was
The Young People’s Concerts
, hosted by Leonard Bernstein, and the opera was Beethoven’s
Fidelio
. He played Rocco, singing in German, and that he could speak another language amazed me. When I asked my mother why he didn’t speak it at home, she said he couldn’t. He’d just memorized the sounds.

“He wanted that to be my career,” my father continued. “My life. We had terrible fights about it.”

My father and I never fought. I loved him. He was kind. He had a beautiful voice. And we looked
exactly
alike. He looked, as I think back now, like a Sephardic William Shatner, and tonight I didn’t fear our similarity or think of it as a curse. I wanted to be just like him.

“Why was that so bad?” I asked.

“To be a cantor?” He shook his head. He had the same bewildered look on his face as he did, years later, when late one night I found him staring blankly at the living room wall. Money, I didn’t know then, was worse than tight—all the voice-overs, the career-making national accounts, the GEs, AT&Ts, and Friskies Buffets were going to the Donald Sutherlands, Demi Moores, and Lauren Bacalls of the world, to people, it was reasoned, you subconsciously recognized.
“Nu,”
he answered softly, “I don’t know now.”

We’d do one more loop around the park, though silently this time. We passed the Tavern on the Green, and through the brilliant glass windows I could see a group of waiters gathered around a table and singing—“Happy Birthday!” I guessed. My father had taken me there, too, when I turned thirteen.

Kyle and I made up, of course. Boys can’t stay mad at each other about girls for too long. That’s a job for men.

And one day, Elsa softened toward me.

It happened at BBDO, a big ad firm on the East Side. The
main office was shaped like an enormous circle, with a wide spiral staircase running down the center—a compass rose with multiple rooms around its circumference out of which simultaneous auditions were run. It was a bustling place in the afternoons, and it wasn’t surprising to step off the elevator to see, say, a herd of leggy models so beautiful they seemed a separate species of person, tightly packed on the couches by the receptionist’s desk; or twins of every shape, color, and size; or Dwarfs, Little Nerds with Big Glasses, Cute Old Ladies, mothers with Angelic Infants, or Black People. This time it was Teenage Couples.

Nor was I surprised to occasionally run into my father at these calls, and sure enough he’d had an audition himself that day. I could see the group of voice-over men, sides in hand, each one sitting a chair apart from the others, silently mouthing lines to himself. My dad was standing in front of the receptionist’s desk, talking with one of the casting agents before leaving. These were usually women of a certain type. They wore low-cut, tight-fitting tops; eyeglasses, whether they needed them or not; jeans tucked into leather boots; shoulder-length hair down to what Abe called their mom’s-aged asses. They looked old but seemed younger in their brazenness, in their willingness to ignore fundamental rules of engagement—for example that my father was married, or that I was
right there
. When I came across him with these tan, raven-haired, braceleted women, they stood close and touched his arm or chest when he made them laugh. They took him by the chin and kissed his mouth to say good-bye—and he let them! This made me hate them and him enough to scream, but I always remained silent at dinner that night with my unwitting mother and brother. It had happened, I thought, after our talk, because my father
wasn’t
a Jew. And when I
saw him on this particular day, I added a word to my definition of what a Jew was:
committed
.